Essays on trans, intersex, cis and other persons and topics from a trans perspective.......All human life is here.

This site is the most comprehensive on the web devoted to trans history and biography. Well over 1400 persons worthy of note, both famous and obscure, are discussed in detail, and many more are mentioned in passing.)

There is a detailedIndexarranged by vocation, doctor, activist group etc.

In addition to this most articles have one or more labels at the bottom. Click one to go to similar persons. There is a full list of labels at the bottom of the page. There is also a search box at the top left. Enjoy exploring!

Hoax biographies can be considered a genre, although those that are most successful are accepted at face value and not designated hoaxes.

The concept of hoax does not have clear boundaries, nor is there an established typology (see the various bits and pieces in Wikipedia). Debate continues over the founding documents of religions and which terrorist events are false-flag events. Some writers include women who wrote under male names. Most annoying to us are the anthologies of hoaxes which include the lives of trans persons as if to be trans were in itself a hoax. This issue is confused of course by a small number of trans persons who are indeed fraudsters (eg Charlotte Bach, Alice Baker, Storme Aerison, Celeste Tate, Elizabeth Young, Tito da Paixao Gomes, Lechane Bezuidenhout, Desiré Dubounet).

Yasmina Khadra (Mohammed Moulessehoul Moulessehoul), Algerian, wrote a series of novels about being female in Algeria, published under his wife's name to avoid military censorship.

Books that appear to be biographies of trans persons, but on a closer look appear to be something else.

Juliet Griffiths.GVWW Eric Oakley, hack writer and sometime drag performer, published this implausible account of what would be Britain's first surgical transsexual who was also a famous performer, but who has otherwise been lost to history.

Eric Gilbert Oakley. Man
into Woman: The Amazing account of a male’s change into female, with
full psychological and medical Case History and Personal Analysis
Questionnaire. London: Walton Press, 1964.

Margo Howard-Howard. GVWWEN.WIKIPEDIA If Margo Howard-Howard is a not a performance piece by Penny Arcade who is otherwise Susana Ventura, he is a New York drag artist and sex worker who had encounters with James Dean, Truman Capote. Judy Garland, Andy Warhol, Jackie Curtis, Tallulah Bankhead, Madonna and Elizabeth Windsor.

Margo Howard-Howard with Abbe Michaels. I was a White Slave in Harlem. Four Walls Eight Windows. 1988. Reissued in 1991 with an Introduction by Quentin Crisp.

John White. EN.WIKIPEDIA Don Akensen insisted when his book was published that the story of Irish-Canadian John White, MP made more sense if we assumed that John died young and that his sister Eliza had taken over his identity. More recently Akensen has said that this was a hoax, and the book is now listed as fiction.

Donald H.Akenson. At Face Value: the life and times of Eliza McCormack/John White. Montréal. McGill-Queen's University Press, xiii, 245pp. 1990.

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About Zagria

I have a social science degree. I spent several years in the 70s doing Gay Lib counselling, and moved on to organizing trans groups. I was rejected by the Clarke Institute (now CAMH) in the mid 1980s, probably because I do not match either of their stereotypes, but was accepted by Russel Reid on our first meeting in late 1987, and had surgery from James Dalrymple some months later. I have mainly worked as an IT consultant. I have been with the same husband for 45 years.